In the long gone past, people planned their television viewing in a relatively leisurely way. There were, at best, about a dozen choices for any given time period. Thus, the selection of a television program for viewing or recording required less than a minute.
However, at the present time, television programming provided by the service providers, together with what is accessible and stored by the viewer, often run into the hundreds of television programs available from hundreds of channels for any given time period. In addition, television programs are no longer just viewed on the conventional television set. Now television programs are accessed on personal computers, wireless mobile devices such as cellular telephones, or personal digital assistants. Often, the viewers are “on-the-go”, e.g. waiting at airports, commuting on buses and trains, waiting in lines. Thus, many potential viewers have free time to view in the order of one-half to one hour. Obviously, such viewers do not have very much time to sort through listings to find their optimum programs for viewing. Thus, the television presentation technology has been seeking ways to shorten television program selection times. The present invention offers an implementation for significantly shortening such selection times.